[Footnote 23:  “For me, the misfortune is, I sympathise just as much with these as with him,—­so there can no good come of keeping this wild company any longer.”—­Feb. 26, 1845.]

III.

“Mere escapes of my inner power, like the light of a revolving lighthouse leaping out at intervals from a narrow chink;” so wrote Browning in effect to Miss Barrett (Feb. 11, 1845) of the “scenes and song-scraps,” of which the first instalment had appeared three years before as the Dramatic Lyrics.  Yet it is just by the intermittent flashes that the lighthouse is identified; and Browning’s genius, as we have seen, was in the end to be most truly denoted by these “mere escapes.”  With a few notable exceptions, they offer little to the student of Browning’s ideology; they do not illustrate his theories of life, they disclose no good in evil and no hope in ill-success.  But they are full of an exuberant joy in life itself, as seen by a keen observer exempt from its harsher conditions, to whom all power and passion are a feast.  He watches the angers, the malignities of men and women, as one might watch the quarrels of wild beasts, not cynically, but with the detached, as it were professional, interest of a born “fighter.”  The loftier hatred, which is a form of love,—­the sublime hatred of a Dante, the tragic hatred of a Timon, even the unforgetting, self-consuming hatred of a Heathcliff,—­did not now, or ever, engage his imagination.  The indignant invective against a political renegade, “Just for a handful of silver he left us,” in which Browning spoke his own mind, is poor and uncharacteristic compared with pieces in which he stood aside and let some accomplished devil, like the Duke in My last Duchess, some clerical libertine, like the bishop of St Praxed’s, some sneaking reptile, like the Spanish friar, some tiger-hearted Regan, like the lady of The Laboratory, or some poor crushed and writhing worm, like the girl of The Confessional, utter their callous cynicism or their deathbed torment, the snarl of petty spite, the low fierce cry of triumphant malice, the long-drawn shriek of futile rage.  There was commonly an element of unreason, extravagance, even grotesqueness, in the hatreds that caught his eye; he had a relish for the gratuitous savagery of the lady in Time’s Revenges, who would calmly decree that her lover should be burnt in a slow fire “if that would compass her desire.”  He seized the grotesque side of persecution; and it is not fanciful to see in the delightful chronicle of the Nemesis inflicted upon “Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis” a foretaste of the sardonic confessions of Instans Tyrannus.  And he seized the element of sheer physical zest in even eager and impassioned action; the tramp of the march, the swing of the gallop in the fiery Cavalier Tunes, the crash of Gismond’s “back—­handed blow” upon Gauthier’s mouth; the exultant lift of the “great pace” of the riders who bring the Good News.